Recognition
by dressedinleather
Summary: Dean is a mess. Nightmares, prayers, and memories. Post s6 implied Dean/Cas. Nearly canon.


_I'll follow thee and make a heaven of hell,_

_To die upon the hand I love so well._

- A Midsummer Night's Dream II.i.234.

Wakefulness came like a jolt of electricity through his body. Dean felt the rough fabric of Bobby's couch, eyes opening to a near pitch room, his hands and the back of his neck clammy. His breath came too quickly, burning in his chest. This was one of a precious few nights in which he actually got to sleep, and here he was wasting it on nightmares.

The specifics of this familiar dream changed, and were lost in the moment he blinked open his eyes, but searching along the muddled roads through his head, he reassembled an abstract variation of the process of hunting, of stress and research and long car rides and rainy, misty roads. Often, in these dreams, it was night the whole time. In his head it was always night.

And the last moment of the dream was the same, the moment that woke him and seared itself into his eyes like the after image of the sun, or an angel's true form–the last thing you ever see. Castiel's eyes would fix on his, mouth slack, his inhuman expression made human. But it wasn't pain writ in the lines of his face; Castiel would not scream or accuse. He would see it coming. His expression was one of recognition. In his last breath he would whisper Dean's name, softly, and Dean would feel the weight of everything he had to do. This was _Cas_, his best friend, and he would have to kill him. And Cas knew Dean had to kill him, wanted it to be Dean. Dean could see, somewhere lost in those blue eyes, the extent to which Castiel understood that Dean did not have a choice, and that this was right. In the end, he was only saving Castiel from himself.

Dean did not want Castiel to understand. He wanted the angel to hate him. There was a time when Dean had considered killing his own brother for the sake of humanity, and he couldn't do it. But he had to kill Cas. There was no other choice.

Dean sat up and leaned into the couch. He huffed at the ceiling. He wondered when the angel had made himself family. He breathed in the musk and dust of the close room. He breathed.

There had been one night, after. After. He couldn't say her name, or wouldn't, but he couldn't help the sense memories of her perfume, her hair sliding between his fingers, her smile in the morning, her back against his bare chest. Their trusting eyes. He'd done what he had to do, making them forget.

And Dean had already known that Cas was off, that they couldn't trust him, and yet. He'd called the angel, and they'd held each other. The pretty, skinny, voluptuous girls that had shared his bed didn't appeal to him. In the past, sex had been enough, been what he wanted, but it wasn't any more. He didn't have the words for it, but he had felt the trembling glow of connection, those threads wrapped around and between two people, and touch without that was empty. He would say that it had been _family_. That was the word he knew, the word he used.

Somewhere along the line, Cas had become family too. Family's supposed to be there for each other. Even after he'd raged at Cas, known he was off, there had been those few precious hours when they held each other, a brief connection that Dean so rarely allowed himself with anyone.

Because _this_ was how it ended, wasn't it?

But they had made it better before. He'd gotten Sam back from Ruby, back from the demon blood, back from Hell.

Maybe the problem tonight was that this dream wasn't exactly a nightmare. Dean had so many of those they barely entered his awareness; being eaten or stabbed or drained or having the flesh peeled from his bones or watching Sammy die were all things to which he was pathetically accustomed. No. In these dreams, Castiel regained himself for a final moment, and Dean got to see a glimmer of the real Cas as he died. He felt the look in Cas's eyes like hellfire in his stomach, like a taloned hand reaching into his chest, and the word, perhaps, was longing.

Anger pushes his fists into the cushions as he stumbles over the memories. Cas had the audacity to say that there was nothing to fix! All the proof Dean needed that what Cas did was wrong was the way it had changed him. He thinks, if Cas had just talked to him, let him in, anything. The fact that he didn't was in many ways worse than unleashing purgatory, claiming to be God. Cas had turned his back on Dean. Dean can't even think that Castiel had done it for him and for humanity, to prevent another apocalypse, to stop Raphael, because really, it isn't about the fate of the world. They'd figured it out once, hadn't they? No, it's about trust.

Dean knows he could have changed things, too, knows it like a knife in his gut. He could have made Cas know he could come to him with anything, that he was family, with all the fucked up baggage that comes with it.

Their story felt like a tragicomedy of errors, a collage of false timing and missed opportunities. Dean wanted to imagine what things could have been like for his friend in different circumstances, another universe. But he knew. The angel Castiel had fallen from grace for Dean Winchester. The too-human Cas? Even in another future Dean had destroyed him and sent him to his death. And now Castiel was a monster claiming to be God. Sam and Bobby were worrying about how to kill him, that he couldn't be killed, and Dean wished he could concentrate on that. He could mourn once it was done, or push it away and drown it out.

The only sound, a humming refrigerator or some other appliance nearby, was oddly comforting. It was late, or early, enough that he heard no insects or animals outside. This place, lived in and filled with too many fearful memories, was the closest thing to home he'd ever have. He knew this place even in the dark. Dean poured himself a whiskey, downed it, and lay down, grateful for his space alone in Bobby's house. He prayed for a dreamless sleep, or sleep at all, because that was a prayer someone might answer.

Would God let Castiel stay dead? Why had He brought him back, before? It was amazing, horrible to imagine Cas could be brought back whole. After all, there was probably nothing left of Dean's Cas in the monster that called itself God, the Cas that had unflinching faith in both Dean and God despite all evidence to the contrary. As Dean's thoughts returned to the branded resolve that he would have to kill _it_, he imagined Cas resurrected, the glow of golden light, of grace that he sometimes associated with the angel, one of a very short list of bright things in his life. Too quickly, his memories found themselves trapped again by the gentle smile of a creature convinced it was God. What good was a God that couldn't grant the one thing Dean wanted?

At last Dean slid back into the fitful darkness.

* * *

><p>It has been a very long summer, hasn't it? I edited this after seeing the s7 sneak peak. I'd already started the piece, a week or two ago, and we just happened to be on Midsummer in my drama lit class last week, so when I saw that line of Helena's, I knew she was being a melodramatic twat, but thought that out of context it was the <em>perfect<em> summation of Dean and Cas's relationship. This is seriously angsty, I know, but for me it's a way of coping with the agony of Supernatural, so hopefully someone sees this as something other than totally depressing.

I haven't written fanfiction since I was thirteen, so let me know what you think if you please.


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